Although the Institute of Contemporary Arts sits at the heart of London’s establishment—on Carlton House Terrace, just along from Buckingham Palace—its space has long been dedicated to showcasing avant-garde and experimental cultural expression. So it made the ideal venue for this afternoon’s show from Fashion East, that ragtag institution whose 25 years of truffling for talent has earned it a unique place within London’s fashion establishment. Once we’d finished poring over the anniversary exhibition of relics from Fashion Easts past, it was time to flip our focus toward the future. This season’s edition featured two newcomers and one returning designer: All presented collections shaped through their different autobiographical experience.
“I like it to be dirty,” said Louis Mayhew, whose collection phrased a subversive interrogation to fashion’s appropriation (and tidying up) of workwear. Mayhew does real work: He’s a painter and decorator by trade, and this collection was titled Hard Graft to reflect that. It featured upcycled garments that were sometimes refashioned through the insertion of his professional accessories—a pair of stain-smudged track pants were ruched with zip ties; a paint-spattered T-shirt was embedded with a paint tub. Other unorthodox insertions included the crocodile clips that gathered T-shirts. One model wore an epee grip on a ribbon around his neck by way of tribute to the Bruce Weber fencing portraits that had influenced Mayhew. Other objects—pipes, shells, a table knife—were attached to garments as signifiers of this designer’s nascent experiments in found fashion. Each object had been found by Mayhew while mudlarking (the river equivalent of beachcombing) by the Thames. But why does Mayhew like it to be dirty? “Because I’d like to think we can change some people’s opinion on what is actually dirty and what is not by having a look at people in their workwear and maybe translating that into fashion.” That felt like only one eddy among the many impulses that flowed through this roughly layered collection.
Nuba returned for its third Fashion East chapter with a collection titled Solid, which translated designer Cameron Williams’s personal experience into pieces much less literally. He said: “There is a nomadic energy to a lot of my references. I often look at people in the streets of London who are immigrants, who come from the same background as me, and I look to see how there will be a flash of cultural dressing with a very metropolitan style. There’s a nomadism in moving from one place to another and still carrying something with you.” That source code was discreetly implicit in a dignified collection that pitted eveningwear against sportswear and played with deconstruction and texture to simultaneously signify membership and exclusion. Williams’s messaging was, to his credit, way too nuanced for these dog-whistle times in mainstream British discourse: Instead, it was resistance through subtlety.
Newcomer Jack Gleba closed the show with his collection, titled It’s True. Hailing from Barcelona, where he trained as a dancer before transplanting to fashion and London, Gleba’s clothes were composed in three movements. The first was signified by the handkerchiefs that flowed from side-split pants and sometimes draped from the body: They drew inspiration from the Ballets Russes, specifically Nijinsky’s desirously handkerchief-draped performance in The Afternoon of a Faun. These created points of flowing release and pent-up tension over the second element, garments in dully toned blocks of color that were largely inspired by off-duty-dancer trainingwear, Gleba said. Within these were inserted hook-and-eye-held imprints of garter belts, girdles, and other accoutrements of old-school underpinnings: Gleba’s third act. Borderline histrionic but absolutely from the heart, this collection was often shown with ballet shoes hand-attached to mid-height heels, while the backs of many looks were pinned with sheets of paper from Gleba’s journal. That underlined what a very personal collection this was.
